


Death in Springtime

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hints Of Mystrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 19:36:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1399903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death comes to us all, even The British Government. Sometimes it comes with a gunshot; sometimes in a cup of tea. How a man faces death, and what comes after, says a great deal about him and about his life.</p><p>This is potentially a bit angsty, but no more angsty than Mycroft himself would allow--and possibly a bit more sappy than he'd appreciate. You'll have to tell me if you think the ending is happy or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death in Springtime

The Star Chamber deliberated; not for mere hours, or days, but for weeks. As the obvious likely decision became more and more clear, Lady Smallwood ceded leadership of the process to Mycroft, allowing him maximum room to refuse the solution. Or, he thought, cannily manipulating him such that his honor alone ensured he would not refuse. Either way he could only admire her character and integrity.

Mycroft could see multiple approaches to avoid the obvious outcome, including some that involved his faked death. He could see no such approaches that were secure and that left his nation in such stable condition.

On a certain day in the near future Mycroft would sit down in his preferred seat at the Diogenes Club. He would order a cup of tea, which would be delivered and drunk. Within hours the first signs of poisoning would begin. Within days he would be dead. Because of this, certain events would transpire…and in the end, because he had allowed this to occur, his own people would prove victorious.

The final decision of the Star Chamber was unanimous. A pot of tea would be ordered. A pot of tea would be drunk. A minor official of the British Government would die…but Britain itself would prevail, and live on.

“You won’t even know if we were right,” Lady Smallwood said in private, afterward. “You won’t know for sure it was worth it.”

“That has always been the case,” Mycroft said, calmly. “When you play the long game, you play a game that will outlive you. It will merely outlive me by a few years more than I had hoped.”

He reviewed his will, but changed nothing. It was important not to give any clue to the enemy that he and his fellows were aware of the upcoming assassination. Likewise he did not update any of the small, private messages to the few people in his life who had claim to his affections or his admiration.

The list was short: Mummy and Father, of course, though he had little novel or exciting to tell them in leaving the world—not that they would be surprised at that; he was, as he had always been, the quiet, responsible son. Sherlock, of course—it was anyone’s bet whether Mycroft’s final words would be read, much less valued. Mycroft himself expected Sherlock would hurl the envelope from the lawyer into the fireplace at 221B Baker Street, play the violin passionately every night for a week, and never mention Mycroft’s name again afterward unless forced by circumstance. Anthea would receive a message that he hoped would warm her heart and advance her career. Lady Smallwood would read of his profound admiration for her spine, her manipulative skills, and her patriotism. Gregory Lestrade would read of Mycroft’s great pleasure at having served with him, couched in terms that might be read as deepest affection if Lestrade wished to receive such a message—but which could be taken as merely collegial if Lestrade felt otherwise. Beyond that a few outstanding persons received thanks for the privilege of their acquaintance, and then Mycroft would, in death, return to his prior silence on the entire subject of sentiment and personal affection.

It was harder than he had expected waiting for death. He was amazed at the flickering thoughts that rose in his mind, battling their way past controls he had come to consider immaculate barring chemical or physical force. Any man could be broken—but he had not expected to be broken by the mere knowledge of his impending demise. Yet how else could he explain the blinding, compelling dreams? The moments when memory overrode conscious awareness, reminding him of the feel of sunlight on his hair as he ran, legs churning, through wet morning fields in early summer, when the grass only rose as high as his knees and the spiders’ webs were gemmed with dew? Why recall with such bittersweet poignancy the scent of his first lover—sweat, wine-scented breath, semen, wool—in his rooms at Baliol? The man in question had been a complete chancer, a bastard of the highest level. Why recall him with such brimming regret when even at the time Mycroft had been delighted to be shut of him?

Lady Smallwood visited him in private to suggest in strongest terms that she and certain others wished to find an alternate solution to the problem. Mycroft humored them…if nothing else, if anyone could find a more adventitious route, it would be Bets Smallwood. He was unsurprised, though, when the outcome remained as previous: it would be most to Britain’s benefit for Mycroft Holmes to be seen to die…seen quite incontrovertibly to die, in the sorts of ways that left no real questions as to the completeness of that death.

Mycroft held rigidly to his normal behaviors. Alone among his peers, he was known for his habits and his near-ritual restrictions. He moved regularly from his rooms on Pall Mall to his various offices, and from his offices to the Diogenes Club. He detoured only when business or family demanded his attention. Sherlock, during the weeks preceding his impending death, was not so demanding, and business only called Mycroft from his usual haunts once or twice.

So it was that on a morning in early April Mycroft stepped into the Diogenes club, sat in his leather club chair by the fire, and ordered the pot of tea he knew would kill him—and would, in a trickle-down domino chain, lead to the death of one sous chef, the removal of one human resources administrator in the Diogenes Club’s management roster, and cut the ties between certain enemy agents and a club best known for the stellar governmental power of its members…all this among other, more vital outcomes.

To his surprise radioactive tea was unexpectedly pleasant to drink.

What followed was considerably less so. The loss of hair, for example, was a painful humiliation—dying young should have at least been a way of avoiding that otherwise inevitable outcome. The pain, incontinence, the overwhelming weakness? Loathsome.

Mycroft, to his eternal shame, cried when Sherlock came to his bedside, and it was no great compensation that Sherlock did likewise when Mycroft begged him not to allow Lestrade to see him as he was.

Death came as a blessing.

The last face he saw was Bets Smallwoods’. She held his hand as the tunnel narrowed and vision failed, and sang him a lullaby. He was in too much pain and too far gone by then to marvel at her gentleness.

oOo

“Mr. Sigurson? There’s someone to see you, sir.”

Mike Sigurson looked up from the rather clumsy landscape he was drawing, and frowned. “Is there a name associated with this ‘someone’?”

“Bets? I think she said to tell you it was Bets.”

Mike nodded. “I…see. Yes. Show her out to me, by all means.” He turned and examined the rolling meadow outside the Massachusetts clinic. It was a beautiful spring morning, with summer pressing hard at the door. The dewy grass was perhaps knee-high, and decked with spider webs.

“You’re looking well,” she said.

He turned to her, and grimaced. “You have only yourself to blame for that. I’d rise, but I’m afraid recovery is a slow process. Might I ask what you and yours dosed me with to so effectively mimic radiation poisoning?”

She shrugged. “No, you may not. Leave a lady her secrets, please. I’m glad it worked, though.” She sat in a wicker chair at the table beside him. “I like your hair. I always did think you were wrong to darken it.”

“It’s so hard for people to take a flaming orange ginger seriously,” he sulked. “And a balding flaming orange ginger? Impossible.” He added a few pencil strokes to his drawing, and sighed heavily. “I have no talent for this. Nor do I wish to. Bets, whatever do you expect me to do with myself? Even granting that I prefer being alive, all said and done, to being deceased, I can’t see that there’s much use for me here, undercover in the States. Even the CIA has no idea I’m here.  Or…do they?”

“That depends on who you count,” Lady Smallwood said, with a tight smile. “Let’s say you’re considered a highly valued asset by a very, very small cadre of individuals in both the UK and the US. A consulting spymaster: the first. A resource to be called upon only when all other routes appear closed.”

Mike’s ginger brows flew up, and he smirked. “Well. I…had a brother once who’d find that quite ironic.” Then he cocked his head. “And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, I think ‘Mr. Sigurson’ might want to retire to his pleasant country estate outside New Bedford. It’s on a lake, I’m told. He can write spy novels, and is rumored to have a reliable private income.”

“How nice for Mr. Sigurson,” he said, dryly.

She snorted, and gave him a knowing eye. “You’ll be great at it, Mike. You always were good at words and clever plot-lines…and your mastery of narrative was impeccable. You’ll settle in, develop contacts, spend summers running back and forth between your place and Provincetown. You’ll have friends…oh, don’t give me that look. It’s high time, you great looby. A man needs a life, not just a duty.” She wiped her hand over her eyes, then, and the sapphire stone and the gold bands of her bridal set flashed in the morning light. “You idiot. I lost one precious man already. Did you think I’d let you spend yourself, too? Just because you’re as solitary and upright as a lone flagpole on a high hill doesn’t mean you don’t have people who love you, you tit.”

He ducked, abashed. “I appreciated you being there at the end,” he said, softly. “I’m glad I can thank you for it now.”

Her hand reached out, and his crept across the glass top of the table between them. She gripped firm.

“I’m always here for you, my dear friend,” she said.

He nodded. “I shan’t ask how things are in your work,” he said.

“Best you don’t,” she agreed.

“New life and all that…”

“Yes. Though you can expect a few old faces to show up,” she said. “Indeed…we have a few people who wanted to serve as permanent liaisons.”

“Anthea?”

“Possibly…someone of a similar name, perhaps?”

He smiled, mischievously. “Perhaps.”

“Expect them when you see them,” she said, then rose. “I’ll have to be going, then.”

He nodded. “I hope to see you occasionally again.”

“When possible,” she said, and both knew that “possible” meant very seldom indeed.

The house on the lake was lovely. The property was large enough to support a horse. Mycroft started to ride again, as his strength returned. He learned to sail a slight boat. He swam.

He wrote the first draft of a novel.

He even went to Provincetown and got into blistering political arguments with the residents, then retired to a review after. He discovered a taste for fried clams and steamed lobster. He learned why people in the States were so strange about tomatoes and about green corn on the cob—a point that frozen corn kernels had never satisfactorily resolved for him previously.

He had tea in the evenings, like a good British man, but sometimes it consisted of Boston baked beans and Boston brown bread slathered with butter, rather than of Heinz baked beans on toast. Sometimes he drank chowder and watched the Canada geese honk their way around the circumference of the lake.

And one day a man just above medium height, with silver hair and brown eyes, rang his doorbell, and when Mike answered, said, “I was told you were dead.”

Mike shrugged, and said, “Apparently it was all a vast April Fool’s joke on Lady Smallwood's part,” and let the other man in. When he found himself enfolded in a hug so tight his ribs cracked, he laughed, and murmured, “April Fool’s, my dear. April Fool’s!”


End file.
